Explain the terms synthetic and analytic languages
Disclosure of the essence of a synthetic language. Characteristics of the main types of synthetic languages. Purpose and main functions of the analytical language, the background of its formation. Modern use of synthetic and analytical languages.
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1.Synthetic language
1.1Types of synthetic languages
2. Analytic language
2.1 Background
2.2 Isolating language
3.Synthetic and analytic languages
4.Conclusions
5.References
analytical applications synthetic language
1. Synthetic language
A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combination of two or more morphemes into one word. The information added by morphemes can include indications of a word's grammatical category, such as whether a word is the subject or object in the sentence. Morphology can be either relational or derivational.
While derivational morpheme changes the lexical categories of words, inflectional morpheme does not. In the first example below, faster remained an adjective when followed by the suffix; however, teacher becomes a noun after the suffix is added. Therefore, the first case is an example of inflection and the latter derivation.
fast (adjective, positive) vs. faster (adjective, comparative)
teach (verb) vs. teacher (noun)
In synthetic languages, there is a higher morpheme-to-word ratio than in analytic languages. Analytic languages have a lower morpheme-to-word ratio and higher use of helping verbs and word order. The four subtypes of synthetic languages are agglutinating languages, fusional languages, polysynthetic languages, and oligosynthetic languages.
1.1 Types of synthetic languages
Agglutinating languages
Agglutinating languages have a high rate of agglutination in their words and sentences, meaning that the morphological construction of words consists of distinct morphemes that usually carry a single unique meaning.[4] These morphemes always look the same no matter what word they are in, so it is easy to separate a word into its individual morphemes.[1] Note that morphemes may be bound (that is, they must be attached to a word to have meaning, like affixes) or free (they can stand alone and still have meaning).
Swahili is an agglutinating language.[1] For example, distinct morphemes are used in the conjugation of verbs:
Ni-na-soma: I-present-read or I am reading
U-na-soma: you-present-read or you are reading
A-na-soma: s/he-present-read or s/he is reading
Fusional languages
Fusional languages are similar to agglutinating languages in that they involve the combination of many distinct morphemes. However, morphemes in fusional languages are often assigned several different lexical meanings, and they tend to be fused together so that it is difficult to separate individual morphemes from one another.[1][5]
Polysynthetic
Polysynthetic languages are considered the most synthetic of the three types because they combine multiple stems as well as other morphemes into a single continuous word. These languages often turn nouns into verbs.[1] Many Native Alaskan and other Native American languages are polysynthetic.
Mohawk: Washakotya'tawitsherahetkvhta'se means "He ruined her dress" (strictly, 'He made the-thing-that-one-puts-on-one's body ugly for her'). This one inflected verb in a polysynthetic language expresses an idea that can only be conveyed using multiple words in a more analytic language such as English.
Oligosynthetic
Oligosynthetic languages are a theoretical notion created by Benjamin Whorf. Such languages would be functionally synthetic, but make use of a very limited array of morphemes (perhaps just a few hundred). The concept of an oligosynthetic language type was proposed by Whorf to describe the Native American language Nahuatl, although he did not further pursue this idea.[6] Though no natural language uses this process, it has found its use in the world of constructed languages, in auxlangs such as aUI.
2. Analytic language
In linguistic typology, an analytic language is a language that primarily conveys relationships between words in sentences by way of helper words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to utilizing inflections (changing the form of a word to convey its role in the sentence). For example, the English-language phrase "The cat chases the ball" conveys the fact that the cat is acting on the ball analytically via word order. This can be contrasted to synthetic languages, which rely heavily on inflections to convey word relationships (e.g., the phrases "The cat chases the ball" and "The cat chased the ball" convey different time frames via changing the form of the word chase). Most languages are not purely analytic, but many rely primarily on analytic syntax.
Typically, analytic languages have a low morpheme-per-word ratio, especially with respect to inflectional morphemes. A grammatical construction can similarly be analytic if it uses unbound morphemes, which are separate words, or word order. Analytic languages rely more heavily on the use of definite and indefinite articles, which tend to be less prominently used or absent in strongly synthetic languages; stricter word order; various prepositions, postpositions, particles, and modifiers; and context.
2.1 Background
The term analytic is commonly used in a relative rather than an absolute sense. The currently most prominent and widely used Indo-European analytic language is modern English, which has lost much of the inflectional morphology inherited from Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic, and Old English over the centuries and has not gained any new inflectional morphemes in the meantime, making it more analytic than most other Indo-European languages.
For example, while Proto-Indo-European had much more complex grammatical conjugation, grammatical genders, dual number and inflections for eight or nine cases in its nouns, pronouns, adjectives, numerals, participles, postpositions and determiners, standard English has lost nearly all of them (except for three modified cases for pronouns) along with genders and dual number and simplified its conjugation.
Latin, Spanish, German, Greek and Russian are synthetic languages. Nouns in Russian inflect for at least six cases, most of them descended from Proto-Indo-European cases, whose functions English translates using other strategies like prepositions, verbal voice, word order, and possessive 's instead.
2.2 Isolating language
A related concept is the isolating language, which is about a low number of any type of morphemes per word, taking into account derivational morphemes as well. A purely isolating language would be analytic by necessity and lack inflectional morphemes by definition. However, the reverse is not necessarily true, and a language can have derivational morphemes but lack inflectional morphemes. For example, Mandarin Chinese has many compound words, giving it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, but since it has almost no inflectional affixes at all to convey grammatical relationships, it is a very analytic language.
English is not totally analytic in its nouns since it does use inflections for number (e.g., "one day, three days; one boy, four boys") and possession ("The boy's ball" vs. "The boy has a ball"). Mandarin Chinese, in contrast, has no inflections on its nouns: compare V y tin "one day", OV sn tin "three days" (literally "three day"); ꘢jw y ge nnhi "one boy" (lit. "one [entity of] male child"), ljw s ge nnhi "four boys" (lit. "four [entity of] male child"). Instead, English is considered to be weakly inflected, and comparatively more analytic than most other Indo-European languages.
3. Synthetic and analytic languages
Synthetic languages combine (synthesize) multiple concepts into each word. Analytic languages break up (analyze) concepts into separate words. These classifications comprise two ends of a spectrum along which different languages can be classified. The present-day-English is seen as analytic, but it used to be fusional. Certain synthetic qualities (as in the inflection of verbs to show tense) were retained.
The distinction is, therefore, a matter of degree. The most analytic languages consistently have one morpheme per word, while at the other extreme, in polysynthetic languages such as some Native American languages a single inflected verb may contain as much information as an entire English sentence.
In order to demonstrate the nature of the analytic-synthetic-polysynthetic classification as a "continuum", some examples are shown below:
More analytic
Mandarin lacks inflectional morphology almost entirely, and most words consist of either one- or two-syllable morphemes, especially two due to the very numerous compound words.
Chinese text |
V |
I |
F |
`? |
|||||||
Transliteration |
mngtin |
wo |
de |
pngyou |
hu |
wi |
wo |
zu |
shngr |
dngo |
|
Literal translation |
tomorrow day |
I |
of |
friend friend |
will |
for |
I |
make |
birth day |
egg cake |
|
Meaning |
tomorrow |
I |
(genitive particle(='s)) |
friend |
will |
for |
I |
make |
birthday |
cake |
|
"Tomorrow my friend(s) will make a birthday cake for me." |
However, with rare exceptions, each syllable in Mandarin (corresponding to a single written character) represents a morpheme with an identifiable meaning, even if many of such morphemes are bound. This gives rise to the common misconception that Chinese consists exclusively of "words of one syllable". As the sentence above illustrates, however, even simple Chinese words such as mngtin 'tomorrow' (mng "bright" + tan "day") and pngyou 'friend' (a compound of png and you, both of which mean 'friend') are synthetic compound words.
The Chinese language of the Classic works, and of Confucius for example, is more strictly monosyllabic (and southern dialects to a certain extent): each character represents one word. The evolution of modern Mandarin Chinese was accompanied by a reduction in the total number of phonemes. Words which previously were phonetically distinct became homophones. Many disyllabic words in modern Mandarin are the result of joining two related words (such as pngyou, literally "friend-friend") in order to resolve the phonetic ambiguity. A similar process is observed in some English dialects. For instance, in the Southern dialects of American English, it is not unusual for the short vowel sounds e and i to be indistinguishable before nasal consonants: thus the words "pen" and "pin" are homophones (see pin-pen merger). In these dialects, the ambiguity is often resolved by using the compounds "ink-pen" and "stick-pin", in order to clarify which "p*n" is being discussed.
Rather analytic
English:
"He travelled by hovercraft on the sea" is largely isolating, but travelled (although it is possible to say "did travel" instead) and hovercraft each have two morphemes per word, the former being an example of relational synthesis (inflection), and the latter of compounding synthesis (a special case of derivation with another free morpheme instead of a bound one).
Rather synthetic
Japanese:
ɂƂāA̋q̎ʐ^͌ꂪ̂łBWatashitachi ni totte, kono naku kodomo no shashin wa miseraregatai mono desu means strictly literally, "To us, these photos of a child crying are things that are difficult to be shown", meaning 'We cannot bear being shown these photos of a child crying' in more idiomatic English. In the example, most words have more than one morpheme and some have up to five.
Very synthetic
Finnish:
Kyttytyessn tottelemattomasti oppilas saa jlki-istuntoa
"Should they behave in an insubordinate manner, the student will get detention."
Structurally: behaviour (present/future tense) (of their) obey (without) (in the manner/style) studying (they who (should be)) gets detention (some). Practically every word is derived and/or inflected. However, this is quite formal language, and (especially in speech) would have various words replaced by more analytic structures: Kun oppilas kyttytyy tottelemattomasti, hn saa jlki-istuntoa meaning 'When the student behaves in an insubordinate manner, they will get detention'.
Georgian:
gadmogvakhtunebinebdneno (gad-mo-gw-a-xtun-eb-in-eb-d-nen-o)
'They said that they would be forced by them (the others) to make someone to jump over in this direction'.
The word describes the whole sentence that incorporates tense, subject, direct and indirect objects, their plurality, relation between them, direction of the action, conditional and causative markers, etc.
Classical Arabic:
ǿ awa???aynkumhu ?abathan (a-wa-a??ay-n-ku-m-hu ?abath-an)
"And did we give it (masc.) to you futilely?" in Arabic, each word consists of one root that has a basic meaning (a?? 'give' and ?abath 'futile'). Prefixes and suffixes are added to make the word incorporate subject, direct and indirect objects, number, gender, definiteness, etc.
Conclusions
Questions of synthetism and analytism (or synthesis and analysis) are one of the cardinal linguistic problems developed synchronously and diahronno on the material of the most different Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. These questions are closely related to human perception of the surrounding reality and peculiar breaking this reality in the structure of the language. Phenomena reality is not perceived by people individually, however analytically. It is always a complex of signs -- the subject and its position in space or its relation to the speaker, his characterization from the point color, volume, statics, dynamics, etc. In the language of these complexes decomposed into component parts. Its limit this activity human consciousness reaches in a dictionary where each highlighted the lexical unit understands its possible semantic variants, and in grammar in which from a complex and intertwined system relations between objects and signs, etc. highlights the main units transformed into one or another grammatical morphemes (N. A. Laponogov, 1967). The problem of synthesis and analysis is thus acts as a problem of private and common.
The terms synthetism and analytism are interpreted differently, but traditionally under the synthetism understand the expression of one unit of language in one grapheme word, and under analyticism -- the expression of one unit language in different grapheme words that are analytical constructions (N. A. Laponogova, 1967).
It is common to speak of synthetism and analytism when applied to grammar and very rarely -- to vocabulary. However, outside of Analytics, to determine that such a word is difficult.
Being the main line of development of Romance languages that have passed difficult path from synthesis to analysis in their grammatical structure, this problem it was considered in particular detail in romanistics.
Exactly Romance languages were the basis for the initial development of these questions, who then became interested in the Germanists, Slavists and representatives other language groups. In the formation of the grammatical structure of the Germanic languages, development from synthesis to analysis was not associated only with grammatical by categories. As a rule, the analyticism of the grammatical system was based on lexical units that lost their lexical independence and filled with one or another grammatical content. (For example: the transformation of a number of verbs, through the auxiliary level, into indicators time, faces and numbers; lexical devastation of some prepositions, accepting case functions; adverbs accepting functions degrees of comparison of adjectives, etc.).
The continuous development and formation of new forms is observed in any lexical and grammatical group. The reasons for the formation of certain forms are complex and peculiar, and the ways of their development in the general course of formation the structures of a particular language are different.
In the paradigmatic system of the English language, the verb as the most dynamic of all parts of speech, very active in responding to all new language trends and registers them. In the category of the verb can be found the beginnings of the new, which can later cover the whole structure of the language generally. Leaving his genesis in the depths of history, he continues his clearance and in our time. The main lines of its development are traced with of the remote past, and their progressive movement is steady persists, without going beyond the leading trends (N. A. Laponogova, 1967).
The systematic nature of modern English with characteristic prevalence of analytical elements determines the possibility of analyticism in various areas of the language, for example, not only in inflection, but also in word formation. Observations over living facts of modern English show that the means expressions of a single concept by complex lexical constructions limited to complex words and phraseological units.
A special place is occupied by the construction, which, having properties that are common with above named, however, are fundamentally different from them. there is grounds to assert that these constructions which cannot be attributed neither to phraseological units, nor to complex words, have already moved to new category -- the category of analytical lexemes.
If we agree that the main condition for the formation analytical forms is their correlation with synthetic forms, then in this case, the presence of analytical lexemes is quite natural, since they have something to relate to: they relate to simple words, Monolithic or synthetic (N. A. Laponogova, 1967: 51). So, a parallel word to to be tired is to tire just like in Russian language marry, but get married. If not always available correlative synthetic and analytical lexemes, then in this. There is a complete analogy in inflection. In Russian, analytical verb forms are found only in one future tense of imperfect of the form: I will read, but I will read. On the other hand, in a group English perfect there are only analytical forms and There are no synthetic, with which they would correspond.
Thus, analytical forms in one category can arise and develop on the background of synthetic forms of another grammatical category. If you are consistent, you can imagine in an ideal case a language possessing exclusively analytical forms that are not correlated with any synthetic by forms. But we will still consider it analytical if it is possess characteristic features of the analytical system, namely, if each form in it will consist of a service modifier and lexical -- differentiator of elements (N. A. Laponogova, 1967).
This most important, typologically conditioned feature of English lexical subsystem attracted the attention of many researchers such as ai Smirnitsky, G. N. Vorontsova, N. N. Amosov, A. V. Kunin. However, its fruitful consideration was prevented by disputes about the very admissibility of analyticism in vocabulary, and when they ended denying such a possibility (AI Smirnitsky, 1959: 83), the question arose on attributing this phenomenon to morphology, syntax, word formation or phraseology. It remains unresolved for the reason that nature analytical derivation in the vocabulary does not allow to treat it as a phenomenon grammatical (morphological or syntactic); it and not word-formation, since the product of derivation is not a word; finally it's not phraseology, since there is no idiomaticity, but there is a regularity derivations on certain models.
According to I. V. Shaposhnikov source of theoretical difficulties in this important issue served as the interpretation of the word as an element lexical language subsystem. Meanwhile the central position of the word in the macrosystem of a language is due to the fact that it appears in all three of its subsystems -- grammar, sound and lexical.
It is illegal to interpret a word as an element of one of them. Lexical subsystem is a collection of nominations, titles for the selected in the surrounding world of objects, processes, qualities. The word is canonical nomination form, and canonicity does not imply obligation. So, official words, undoubtedly being words, but not nominations, in lexical language subsystem are not included. On the other hand, the nomination can be done by combining words. If such a connection fairly regular and stable, it has the same element status the lexical subsystem, as an unofficial word, differing from it analyticity of its structure. A. I. Smirnitsky was right to refuse recognize the possibility of the existence of an analytic word because it would consist of words, and the whole and its part cannot be the same title. The element of the lexical subsystem must be recognized not a word, but lexeme, which can be either single-word or non-word, analytical. The ratio of these two structural types of tokens in one language or another, its most important line characteristic.
General principles for constructing analytical lexemes, on the one hand, the same as for analytical combinations in grammar, on the other hand the same as in synthetic word formation. They combine little by little standard models are two functionally different components -- main and service. Semantic function of the main component as the root in the word and how the conjugated verb in the analytic combination consists in carrying the core value, modified in the derivative.
The semantic function of the service component, like affix or auxiliary verb, is to modify the stem values. Understandably, the widespread view of desemantization service components of analytical entities, both in grammar and in vocabulary without foundation, because the change of semantic characteristics of the word due to functional specialization does not lead to the loss of all meaning, to semantic desolation.
Analytical lexemes, as well as individual words, have a part-word characteristic. Among the English analytical lexemes prevail verbs, a lot of nouns. Belonging to the part of speech is determined by the service component of the lexeme, leading in grammatical plan.
In modern typology stands out the concept of type of language, under which is understood as a stable set of leading signs of language and Type in language which is understood as features in the structure of a language, not being leading to a given language, but forming some stable set of features.
Historically, there are four language types based on the account signs and properties of the formal aspects of the word, its ability attach inflection and word formation morphemes: inflectional, agglutinative, insulating, polysynthetic.
Typological restructuring of the English language, especially actively held in the middle English period, affected all of its subsystems and led to a significant transformation of its structural type.
English, historically inflectional, acquired features of root isolation and agglutination characteristic of the analytical type of language.
References
1.Close R. A. A teacher's Grammar. The central problems of English. LTP London, 1994.- 166p.
2.Cruse D. A. Lexical Semantics. -- Cambridge: University Press, 1997. -310p.
3.Analysis of Germanic languages in the historical-typological, Cognitive and Pragmatic Aspects: Monograph / Institute Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences; NSU. Novosibirsk, 2005. -- 245s.
4.Analytical constructions in languages of different types: / Otv. ed. V.M.
5.Zhirmunsky, O. P. Sunik. -- Moscow-Leningrad: Science, 1965.
6.Anichkov I. E. Adverbial postpositions in modern English language // Scientific notes of the Pyatigorsk State Pedagogical Institute. .24. 1961.
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